The Threat People Like Obama and Neil deGrasse Tyson Pose to America || Thomas Sowell Reacts

the vision of the anointed self congratulations as a basic for social policy I mean you PA it here that there are a group of self anointed elitist who are responsible for what in America well for much much of the social policy of the past 30 years and for the disastrous consequences that have followed from those policies and who are these people well there would be people in the media in the academic world and in politics uh particularly those who believe that uh third parties can make better decisions than people can make for themselves and particularly

when they are those third parties uh I I think most people who have not been in the academic world would have to see the academics in action to realize how deeply they believe this I can remember a conference at Middlebury College some years ago in which they were laying out these plans for how they would manipulate the poor in order to get them to do this to do that to do the other and I said who are we to be running these people's lives and they looked at me as if I were a man from

Mars speaking a language they had never heard before do you do you therefore believe I mean I I this is almost you know University kind of debate do you therefore believe that that the government has no responsibility uh for those uh less fortunate than ourselves uh if free enterprise they cannot find a place in the market economy well there are many things the government can do I think the most important thing they can do is maintain a framework of law in which people do in fact find jobs and find progress after all this is not

a hypothetical question as if this situation has never come up before I mean you look at the entire history of the United States I mean the unit the United States did not become a prosperous country only after the New Deal I mean history didn't begin in the 1960s or even in the 1930s uh and you look at the history of blacks for that matter you know that uh blacks have come a very long way long before the first civil rights law was passed in 19 1960s uh in fact in the 5 years prior to the

Civil Rights Act of 1964 War blacks Rose into professional and similar occupations to a greater extent than in the 5 years afterwards so you would have even if you were if you look back now as an economist and and in some ways as a historian at the civil rights legislation that was passed in 6465 uh in through the Great Society you and in terms of voting rights as well you would say those laws those civil rights laws were unnecessary and counterproductive oh no no and so oh you you had to get rid of the Jim

Crow system you had to have vot had to have voting rights and so on but I remember back in 1964 writing to a friend as the Civil Rights Act of 64 was being uh pought out in Congress that I hope this law would pass with absolutely no crippling amendments exactly as it was written because among other they had some good things in it one was one reason but the other reason was that I was convinced that it would not have the effect that they thought it would have and that one and and what I assumed

very incorrectly was that once people saw that yes this would break down the Jim Crow system it would not cause any dramatic Improvement in the economic condition of black people that you know and that people would then say no now we have to turn to something else in order to do that and I was completely wrong about that that when when when it didn't produce that result they said well that just shows we need more of the same which is which is the old argument you know we try policy X and absolutely does goes nowhere

we need stronger policy X as this argument has been I'm sure voiced to you before Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative action said so Clarence Thomas says so I bet no he doesn't no he does not Clarence Thomas does not say that that uh affirmative action programs helped him in terms of the educational opportunities he he's never said he's never said it to me do you believe he do you think he would say no to that question he might well for one thing uh I for one thing I my understanding and I I haven't researched my

understanding is that he was admitted uh to college the year before they began their affirmative action program I don't know his what and what and and and what the program did was to delegitimize what he had done that he he was a man with an outstanding academic record right uh and he and he goes out into the job market and people and despite this and they look at him and they say you got there only because of affirmative action rather because of your own marriage where ordinarily someone with that kind of record you look at

say this guy is really a world beater uh but no and I've seen that in my own life uh I'm old enough that I can I've gone through the whole metamorphosis and what have you seen in your own life all right when I was in the in the Marine Corps and this in the during the Korean War I was trained as a photographer and I I was signed to Camp Leu North Carolina where great many of Southerners were in the Marine cor white Souther and in that Barracks whenever somebody had a photographic problem his camera

wasn't working his pictures didn't come out right and so forth they would come to me I was astonished the most biggest redneck in in the Barrack would come to me to ask me and there were all these white photographers fix my camera yeah you say I want why is this and I finally figured it out they said you know if this guy is black and he's a photographer he must be some photographer you know now uh when I started teaching in the early 1960s at the Douglas College I read up on all the stuff about

new teachers you seeing how uh it's hard to get the respect of the students particularly if you're not much older than they are and I look younger than I was uh and so I worried about that you see and I walked in that room the first day and it was Instant Respect and I I you know it sort of took me back and and I and I realized no no they they they're they're saying look this guy I was the first black male to teach there this guy must be something else you know go forward

now 10 years by this time I've completed my degree I've written my books journalart all the whole thing I'm now teaching at UCLA and students will come up to me at the end of the term and they'll say how much they like the course and all that uh and somewhere in the course of that there'll be a slip up and they let let it out that they were quite surprised that the course was as good as it was and one of the one of the things that struck me even before the end of the term

one kid came to me one day and he had a passage in the book he was having trouble with and he said can you tell me what this means I explained to him what that that passage man he said are you sure and I said yes I wrote The Textbook and he looked in the front he's really embarrassed but this is what affirmative action has done you see so you can't see any positive I'm sure cont affirmative action that in fact it increased the pool as you know as frequently used the expression of what affirmative

action can do is increase the pool of what that means and I I've never had anybody explain it to me I've studied affirmative action in this country in India and Malaysia you know in Sri Lanka in Nigeria uh they have they have some version of it in Israel well I'm going to explain as it was explained to me it is the notion of it lets of admissions committee at Harvard and you're going to choose so many people you're going to let people in for a variety of reasons one is sheer academic Merit uh they scored

1,600 on their college boards that's a good entry they've got a brilliant uh academic and athletic background and they happen to be a virtuoso violin player you know and the violin player helps or let's say they come from Nevada and they don't have a lot of Nevada at Harvard and let's also say that they are come from uh Sri Lanka they don't have many people from Sri Lanka there and let's also say that that they also are African-American M and that that ought to be a factor in in choosing from that pool maybe that's one

of the considerations because what uh because divers of a student body is a healthy Factor I'm I'm fascinated with the extent to which words we were're conditioned to react like pavo's dog to words I hear diversity someone was asking that don't make me look bad Professor someone today who a who's a trustee of a college was saying that they were going to pick a new college professor I said what you should do is have a stopwatch there and just count how long it is to till each of the uh contestants says the word diversity and

the guy who says it you know he's 35 minutes into the interview the other guy who says it you know the first sentence the guy who said takes 35 minutes he should be at the top of the list the guy who said it the first sentence should be at the bottom because the what's wrong with diversity I don't get the point my point is that this is a word that has become magic what does it mean if anything are you saying to me that all black people are alike therefore you've got to mix and match

by race it's not diverse unless it's diverse along these I tell you what I'm saying I'm saying that I think that it would be different to have people of different kinds of experiences uh and we mentioned Sri Lanka didn't we and you know and it'd be interesting to have some people uh with an Asian background wait wait an Asian back and African-American uh people uh that come from uh Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue as well as from Henderson North Carolina all of that would make a healthy student body you mean to tell I don't think

everybody ought to come from uh sons of of Harvard graduates all right my daughters m partly because they're not always the best students no that's right but but uh uh all right um that argument I think that does that doesn't make it I I I slipped my point there for for a minute well I mean you have thought long and hard about this and and much longer than I have and you bring to that's the the that's the theory unfortunately unfortunately the facts are quite different at places like Harvard and Stanford and Cornell what you

what you have is the black son of the black doctor who lived in the same neighborhood with the white son of the white doctor and now you're giving me diversity because these two people no not necessarily they have scholarships that they offer to kids who not but now we're getting away from the whole racial thing I'm saying the racial thing has been used as a proxy for something that is not a proxy for because the vast majority of blacks who go to places like Harvard and col and Cornell and Stanford are not blacks from the

ghetto those are blacks from out there you know they're from Malibu uh you know they're from Pacific Palisades uh they're from WKA and so forth and they're from the very same neighborhood they're from the very same neighborhoods as the whites are there and so and so now you call it diversity because You' see something with with with the naked eye all right let me make a couple other points CU I'm I'm going to weigh ahead of myself here uh do you think that the era of these uh social Engineers from whatever establishment they come from

media Academia government is over no I wish it were I think they're going to go underground they're going to hunker down and and when and and wait wait out the stor wait for the storm to change absolutely and we have people in the and among among the Republicans for example who I I say these things like this are like crab grass you've got to root it out do not cut back on the Appropriations for an National Endowment you're not going to get rid of it you don't want to gut come on I mean you clearly

don't want to gut the I do not I want to destroy it entirely of course I don't want to gut it you want to dismantle that's right because it's like while you're at it get public television as well you you got it but uh uh well you'll never appear again thank you very much I never have anyway uh no but it's like crab grass these people are going to hunker down and then they they'll wait for the for the change of the political thing and I say these guys are like somebody who's putting a lawn

mower over Cass but these guys you seem to be saying are everywhere these I mean I me but you're not talking about just bureaucrats you're saying I mean you're saying it's the New York Times it's CBS absolutely AB it's Harvard University and the Yale faculty absolutely UCLA faculty and the Stanford faculty all of them oh absolutely you know what amazes me is that you buy into these conspiracies like this that some conspiracy no not a conspiracy at all no no these people all these people never believed in conspiracy theor all these people somehow have come

to of power in the establishment have come to this like-minded idea about well that's happening many times in history appointed I don't believe for a minute I think if people at Harvard meet wholly independently and sealed off from people from Stanford and they go into those committee rooms they will come out with the same kinds of policies because they went in with the same assumptions and be and because their experiences you suggest are essentially the same probably well I don't know about that I don't know about that then why do they come to the same

conclusions well because they operate under the same assumptions and why do they have the same assumptions for reasons which you can go back into history no no come on why do they have the same we do you mean go back in history uh this has been a set of assumptions that been very popular among intellectuals what has happened in our time is that intellectuals have been taken much more seriously since the 60s than they were before I think we're suffering the consequences of it it's not the first time in history that intellectuals have been taken

seriously uh and disasters have followed so we shouldn't have taken Milton Freedman seriously mil Milton Friedman uh is one is is a very atpal play this game and say well we shouldn't take intellectuals seriously then accept those that I happen to think are right take Ser by by by seriously I mean in a sense I should have clarified this in the sense that they are Exempted from the test of facts did it work when I hear people come on the air and say these lofty things I say to myself show me where we've ever gotten

better off listening to people like this right all right I I I see these psychologists coming on say how you should raise your children I said how are children better today now that we've been listening to these people for 30 years are they happier are they more learned uh you know test scores go down vural disease goes up suicide rates go up in what way are we better off having listen to them but it seems to me that you do engage a little bit in group dismissal that you in a sense wave your hand have

anybody rather than saying that that each of these kinds of Institutions or there is not a group thinking the institution that there you you tell me that that the uh uh a group think someone did a survey at Stanford a couple years ago they found whole departments in which there was not one Republican the why is it that on the Washington I mean look at at torial people who write the editorials and and under by lines or for the paper of the Washington Post you got George will there and certainly what George Will says is

different from what David broer says and certainly what Bill Sapphire says is quite different from what Tom fredman says from what oh absolutely Marine Dow thinks absolutely but they're all part of the New York Times that's that's very true yeah but the fact is that they are the exceptions they are the exceptions as Milton Freeman is the exception and the only good guy are the exceptions and meaning gender free but you use the word dismissal that's not that's one of the words I I I I latch on to in the chapter about the vocabulary of

the anointed that whenever you reach a conclusion that is that is different from what from what they have they say you've dismissed it you can spend three volumes analyzing it and at the end you come up and saying it's wrong oh he dismissed it many of the things the government and intellectuals call a crisis are not OB L worse than other human conditions and more often than not the so-called crisis has been improving on its own without government intervention but of course as clearly pointed out any effort to point to the evidence that the situation

is actually getting better and doesn't need government intervention automatically earns you the label of a denier or accused of being in dismissal if you try to point out that the level of carbon dioxide is not as critical as the fear mongers make it appear your call the climate denier if you simply point out that your own white blood cells are more than capable of fighting the flu well you're called a v denier so in fact as far as intellectuals or particularly the left are concerned you cannot think differently because to think differently is not exactly

thinking differently but is denying the gospel of the group so it's either you go with the flow or you're an Infidel you let me know what you think about this in the comments ments below if you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up subscribe hit that Bell if you're new to the channel thank you for watching and until the next one stay free